Miller said that “foolish mistakes” were made by IRS employees who were trying to be “more efficient” in carrying out their duties. Now, he said, “the agency is moving forward.”...

Under sharper questioning by Rep. Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-La.), Miller denied that the IRS engaged in “targeting” conservative groups, saying that was a “pejorative term” and that the employees had centralized a “list” of applications in a “troublesome” manner....

Miller said later in response to tough questions from Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) that he did not believe any IRS information on the conservative groups was shared outside the agency. “That would be a violation of law,” he said. “I would be shocked if that happened.”

140 comments:

Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

This guy ain't good enough at the ly to stay out of prison.Just based on his responses to questions on his former reaponses to Congress he is going to face indictment for lying to Congress.His responses to other questions seem to say that he is not taking this seriously.He really believes his s--t don'r stink.

He really is the Space Cowboy if he thinks anybody is buying (outside of garage and Retread) that.

Gangster of Love? Not even the She Devil of the SS.

Jay said...

This is good:

Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Dare I add this is what (Godwin alert) did when it was time to do something about all those ethnic minorities.

Matthew Sablan said...

The other quote I'm seeing attributed to him in the hearing today is this: "It was incorrect but not untruthful."

Interesting how quickly the Representatives spring into action and hold a hearing. At least it keeps them from writing more legislation.

From Kim Strassel:"Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action. "

If they'd subjected all 401(c).4 applications to the same amount of scrutiny, then it would've been non-partisan. They didn't. Left-leaning groups were approved far faster tha conservative groups. The questions asked were far more intrusive and in some cases, they turned over the information to opposition groups. For him to claim this wasn't a process driven by political bias and partisanship is a flatout lie.

Liberals and leftists are not partisan. Only conservatives and Republicans are partisan, by definition. Liberals and leftists are always neutral, mainstream, and fair, by definition. They can never do any wrong. Ever.

If the POTUS is responsible for every action of a PFC on a night shift 10,000 miles away, a POTUS ought to be responsible when his Senior Executive Service (SES) staff, in DC, mislead Congress. Of particular note was the General Counsel, a Political SES, (one of two), who was fully briefed in Aug 2011, but who didn't send up flares and allowed his boss to lie to Congress 6 months later...

And for those (like MSNBCs' Lawrence O'Donnel) who defend the IRS by claiming they were overwhelmed with rising application numbers and were only trying to more sharply rationalize the process, it should be noted that the year such "targeting" began saw a decline in number of applications from the previous year..

It started with "rape" which required duplication to establish severity. It has since progressed to "shocked", which may or may not imply knowledge of an event. At what level of duplication -- or perhaps duplicity -- does an implication become substantial?

The semantic games play on... until someone, two, three, four lose their lives. Then we have murder murder or something.

Does anyone else feel that we have been forced to take a detour from reality? Perhaps we have entered The Twilight Zone, where "serving man" has an ulterior motive.

Acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller said indicated he did not know who was responsible for the targeting of conservative groups by IRS agents. ”I don’t have that name, sir,” he told GOP congressman Dave Reichert in today’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the scandal, which came to light last Friday.

The most famous example is Harry Reid talking about Romney's tax returns.

However, on this more mundane level presently under discussion, I believe there is already sworn testimony that the Cincinnati IRS office passed at least some (c)(3) applicants' donor lists and other information on to Democrat action groups.

My original assessment was that this was not intentional partisanship. They truly were just trying to apply the law, but in their world-view, progressive organizations are inherently social welfare organizations, while small-government organizations are inherently political.

However, that assessment does not fit with the intrusive, and possibly illegal, questioning that the tea-party groups faced. Based on that, I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Original Mike said... "[Miller] did not believe any IRS information on the conservative groups was shared outside the agency. “That would be a violation of law,” he said. “I would be shocked if that happened.”"

That's already been demonstrated to have happened. Austan Goolsbee discussed in public the taxes of Koch Industries; something he could have only learned from the IRS.

I don't really understand Miller's statement.

ProPublica also published a story admitting the IRS improperly sent them unapproved applications for 9 Tea Party groups. I don't think this is too big a deal since the applications seem to become public records once approved, but Miller's statement as reported makes no sense.

I think Miller must be claiming that the extra information gathered as part of the intrusive and improper examinations was not shared outside the IRS. This is interesting as it's the first time I've seen this fact asserted. I suspect the reporter doesn't really understand what's going on (as usual) and therefore unknowingly cut off an important descriptive element.

I'm not saying that our Federal government in general hasn't seen it's share of corruption over the years, but this has got to be one of the most corrupt administrations in quite a while. It's certainly told the most lies of any I can think of. Over the past 4 years I can't count how many times our president or one of his officials have used semantics and equivocation to obfuscate the truth, and at other times have told outright absolutely shameless baldfaced lies. This kind of toxic atmosphere can only develop when you have a press that's asleep at the wheel.

This LPOS can say what he wants but the IG testified today that there was concerted effort to slow-walk applications - the illegal use of profiling right-of-center groups and to ask illegal questions and request illegal information.

They truly were just trying to apply the law, but in their world-view, progressive organizations are inherently social welfare organizations, while small-government organizations are inherently political.

That shouldn't even matter, though, since a 501(c)(4) can be as political as it likes, so long as it doesn't engage in electioneering as anything more than a sideline, or coordinate its activities with a political party.

tiger said... This LPOS can say what he wants but the IG testified today that there was concerted effort to slow-walk applications - the illegal use of profiling right-of-center groups and to ask illegal questions and request illegal information.

IIRC, some Tea Party Group got approved in 3 months in early 2010, then they instituted BOLO to speed up and centralize the process. The next group with Tea Party in their name got approved 27 months later...

This is so obvious that I wondered how long it would take to see this in the thread. He is scheduled to retire in June.

Shulman will be on next week and that is one of the folks who should go to jail. Another is Lerner and she is all lawyered up. The question is whether anyone has been foolish enough to leave an e-mail undeleted that leads to their hidy hole. Axelrod has already tried the old Nixon line "Nobody would be dumb enough to do this."

I imagine the forensic hard drive guys will be busy unformatting hard drives. These people all have pseudonym e-mail addresses and those will be a subject of search if the GOP has learned anything about computers by now.

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.

Aridog,I read the other day that OFA's application for 501(c)(4) status took three weeks, start to finish. The OFA that I was referring to in my earlier post was the Obama's election group "obama for america" rather than "organizing for america"

"This guy does not even bother to get briefed on thetestimony already public before he goes up beforeCongress?"

When lying, is not helpfull to be "briefed", because the truth may trip up the lie you want to tell... not to mention remnants of a concience may tug at you at the wrong moment in front of the cameras and betray you.

Son of Watergate is worse than Watergate. But the MSM who is complicit in the cover up and intimidations of the Tea Party grass roots will cover for their own. Pretty soon, they will blame the legacy of the Bush's Justice Dept., and the failure of Congressional Republican watchdogs to oversight the IRS. They will call for investigation of the Bushes and the incompetent Republicans. They will accuse anyone criticizes Obama racist, anyone criticizes Hillary is waging war on women.

just a question, I see a lot of Representatives asking for emails, memos and so on. In this digital age, how are we to know that the administration hasn't doctored the emails? how exactly does the WH email system work?

The reason that everyone from Barack Obama on down is so ignorant of the facts relating to any of these scandals is that they are playing by Chicago Rules, the first of which is, "Don't leave no fingerprints." The reason that they had to get Al Capone for tax evasion rather than the dozens of murders he was responsible for is that he didn't leave fingerprints. Although Capone went to prison in 1932 and died in 1947, his spirit lives on. Recall that four of the last seven Governors of Illinois and innumerable Chicago city councilmen have gone to prison.

Later he said theat he had asked a subordinate who was responsible ... but ... he doesn't remember the responsible party's name, a name, you would think, everyone now at the "Agency*" would know.

Holy freakin' crap, everybody in the government is a lying little shit. It is past time to dismantle the IRS, destroy the DOJ, kick out the EPA ... all of them ... and water the tree of liberty with their blood.

Matthew: Good point. I noticed it myself after I hit send. I was referring to the general atmosphere of lawlessness and corruption in Chicago which has apparently infected Washington. Hopefully the tradition of jail time will also move to Washington.

Partisanship, like racism, is subjective. The Federal government uses statistically analysis to “show” hiring bias where no definitive proof of bias exist. In other words, if a business has fewer minority employees than is typical or less than the average community, bias is assumed. (This even though for a small company, the statistical error is too great to accept with 95% confidence level. A small company with 20 employees, 6-minory is cited because the average is 10 with a standard deviation of 2.1 placing the company well within the 95%tile. No bias demonstrated but below average therefore “guilty.”)

Now, to my point, since the government uses statistical criterion for hiring, it should apply the same to demonstrate partisanship, abet correctly. Release how many applicants failed or withdrew their applications and the time it took for approval. From what I have gathered, but cannot prove, there is a statistically significant difference in both. That is more “conservative” groups failed/withdrew and took longer than would be indicated by chance.

If fair the chance that blinding selecting from failed/withdrew or took-longer pile is a conservative group versus choosing from all applicants should be indistinguishable. This is basic quality control. It may be a new concept to much of government with its history being just older than the Republic itself. In that it is not the case, demonstrates not only was the selection bias, but that multiple levels of quality control failed to flagged this.

We are to believe that low level employees implemented a policy that their supervisors failed to identify and that no on-going QC was being done to flag these outliers. When the internal system failed, the external system was far too slow to gain traction. Citizen complaints were filled in the nut-job folder.

Now the real scandal is, not that the government would do this, but the nut-jobs are right, which will slow down progressive policies.

But honestly, we can take assurance that President Obama had nothing to do with this.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Paraphrase Henry II

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent Tea-Party?” Paraphrase President Obama

Just wait until next year when Obamacare is more fully implemented. They claim that they aren't crooks just incompetent so the supervisor is given a big bonus and promoted, so not to worry. Oh yeah, they need more taxpayer money so they can hire more people which might help mitigate some of their incompetence.

Aridog ... The OFA that I was referring to in my earlier post was the Obama's election group "obama for america" rather than "organizing for america"

Correct me if I err<...butOrganizing for Action is made up of and organized by the same people as Obama for America. "OFA" is the acronym in common...same acronym for the same people technically re-organized by the Democratic National Committee. In other words...Obama's campaign organization re-drawn with a very slightly different name.

For proof...query http://www.barackobama.com/faq/ in your browser and see what home screen pops up? Hint: It is also "OFA" ... the new one, not the old one. Also check CNN Politics ...one is the other...viola'!

At this point I'd almost tend to think that the civic engagement involved in putting a mob in the street to grab this guy and hang him from a lamp-post pour encourager les autres would be preferable to modern American indolence.

avwh said... Good to know that in THIS case, Dems don't think disparate impact is proof of any kind of discrimination.

Funny how that hasn't been their position on damn near anything else for the last 40 years.

I think the current circumstance is even worse than this. The IRS action seems similar to the often quoted fact that two resumes identical except for the name will result in much greater rejections for the one with an ethnically identifiable name.

We have leftists falling over themselves to excuse the IRS's action. Does anyone believe they'd defend the results of the resume study?

Well, we now have naked tyranny on display for anyone with a brain to see it.

Conservatives assumed poorly.

Progressives targeted "low information voters" wisely.

It's a math game and the Conservatives are losing.

There is a disgusting cretin by the name of Chip Berlet that specializes in digging up dirt on the right. What previously was assumed - poorly I will add - was a practice limited to Chip Berlet is now evidenced as a practice of the IRS itself when led by a Democratic administration.

I want to thank Mitt Romeny for running a terrible campaign, enabling Barrack Obama's re-election so that the country can see where the American Progressive Left and it's love of big government leads. There is a chance that some will see the light.

I worked for a guy who's lawyer-wife threw all the job applications with a male name on them in the trash.

She was being efficient, too, because men don't work crap part-time jobs for long, right? But women will.

I can believe that someone was trying to be efficient and pick out organizations that seemed political, and it's likely or possible that personal biases influenced those lists in a subconscious way. But that's what leadership is for and there really isn't an excuse, just like their was no excuse for that lawyer lady to throw away the applications filled out by males, not to realize that the IRS had to go out of its way not to appear to be picking one side over the other.

In the annals of cynicism, the Democratic charge that the Republicans are trying to politicize the IRS persecution of the Tea Party sets a new benchmark for brazen hypocrisy. I thought Clinton had retired the Brazen Hypocrite Award, but records are made to be broken.

Aridog, You're correct. But Obama for America wasn't a 501(c)(4). perhaps I misread your earlier post. However, Organizing for America received tax exempt status in about 3 weeks, from what I read earlier in the week.

Miller indicated today that Roady was in fact instructed by the IRS to ask the question, and the Lerner knew about the question in advance. “Who told her to ask the question?” asked Republican representative Kenny Marchant.

“I don’t know, actually, I’m not sure, might have been Lois Lerner,” Miller responded. He went on to say that the IRS intended simultaneously to inform Congress, but admitted the agency only inquired about the congressional calendar.

The planted question reveals coordination at high levels of the IRS with regard to the disclosure of the sensitive information. Lerner and Miller testified before Congress two days before Lerner addressed the ABA, but said nothing about the IRS’s scrutiny of Tea Party groups.

I know that people don't like analogies to Hitler, but I do. So here it is, Hitler never, ever gave an order to do harm to the Jews. Yet the party that he represented found a way to kill a few of them and Hitler was blamed for the killing. So it would seem that Obama is looking at the same spectrum of guilt by association or guilt by incompetence. I am surprised to find that no one in our government, from the president on down have no idea was is happening.

Regardless of whether or not partisanship motivated IRS employees to go after grassroots organizations, partisanship quite obviously dictated their decision to only go after groups from *part* of the political spectrum.

Impeaching Obama is the only way to get some straight answers and publicize the extent of dem political corruption in government. Maybe if we rub the public's nose in this mess, some of them will wake up. Even Charley Rangel is outraged, of course he had his troubles with the irs so his response may be mostly spite.

Many dems employeed by the feds have acted as dem political hacks for many years. For example, world famous global warming alarmist hacks Hanson and Trenberth are fed employees.

Too bad dumb asses who vote for the dems don't realize they are facilitating a one party dictatorship. Once we complete that downward spiral, it probably will take many, many years to restore our republic.

Way past time for conservative states and pols to claw back power from the fed gov and fed judiciary, that is our only hope to stay free.

Dem commentors on this board destroy any shred of credibility they might have had by failing to vigorously criticize this abuse of power by the dems.

but again, Miller is put in that position precisely so that his can be 'fired'. Again, why does Sarah Ingram still have a job? If the people who were involved in this were fired AND stripped of their federal pensions, or at least reduced to the lowest level, the others would quickly figure out that continued malfiesance is a one way ticket to sitting on your porch in your old age, and get back to being professionals instead of hacks masquerading as professionals.

"Wow, Miller's answer to why he withheld info on scandal, he said 'I answered the questions you asked'"

What it sounds like is a criminal defendant following the advice of his lawyer to answer with the minimal possible words and not volunteering any information. Is that the standard we want government officials to use? Really?

In that context (an oversight hearing) he was supposed to be a public servant performing the duties entrusted to him by the law. He was supposed to be in that position because he had competence and integrity. What does that say about him and his conception of his public duty that he thought it was a good idea to act like a criminal defendant? What does that say about what his bosses think? Like you said, his answers were very, very Clintonian. And a very big disappointment.

"Too bad dumb asses who vote for the dems don't realize they are facilitating a one party dictatorship."

Of course they realize it.

Whenever some Democrat decries what he calls "the right-wing extremism of today's Republicans," I always ask him: On what issues would a "non-extreme" Republican Party disagree with the Democratic Party?

Ms. Althouse, you owe Michelle Obama's Mirror a hat tip. MOTUS ran the "Casablanca" video two days ago in relation to the IRS tyranny. I immediately commented on MOM's blog today while watching the hearing on CSPAN. When I heard Steve Miller say "Shocked, Congressman, Shocked!" I fell out of my chair laughing. MOTUS is not only a mirror, she's a crystal ball!